1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to instant noodles, a method for manufacturing the instant noodles, an apparatus for manufacturing the instant noodles and, more particularly, to instant noodles to be cooked in a cooking pot containing boiling water or the like and served, a method for manufacturing the instant noodles, and an apparatus for manufacturing the instant noodles.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional instant noodles of this type, e.g., fried noodles, are manufactured as follows. A dough is formed into a strip by multistage rolls. The strip is linearly cut in its longitudinal direction to form raw noodles. The raw noodles are divided into a plurality of rows in the direction of travel and waved so as to vertically overlap each other. The waved raw noodles are steamed in a steam chamber to which steam is supplied. The steamed raw noodle groups are cut into desired lengths, then put into predetermined frames and fried to manufacture the fried noodles.
The fried noodles manufactured as described above are a block of a plurality of raw noodles each having a length of about 450 mm. These fried noodle are put into a cooking pot containing boiling water or the like and cooked for several minutes before serving. Since the raw noodles are long, the fried noodles must be served with chopsticks. When noodles are served with chopsticks, however, a sipping noise is made which may be uncomfortable for others.
For this reason, a demand has arisen for instant noodles such as fried noodles which consist of short raw noodles and therefore can be eaten with a spoon or fork whereby uncomfortable sipping noises are not made. Such fried noodles can be manufactured as follows. That is, raw noodle groups extracted from the steam chamber in the above fried noodle manufacturing steps are cut into a shorter length than that of conventional fried noodles, put into predetermined frames, and fried to manufacture block-like fried noodles. In order to manufacture fried raw noodles having a length 1/3 that of the conventional block-like fried noodles according to the above method, however, three fried noodles blocks must be packed into a single bag to obtain the same size as that of the conventional packed fried noodles in terms of an outer appearance. For this reason, as compared with the conventional fried noodle manufacturing method, frying and packing steps are tripled, significantly degrading productivity.
In the field of non-instant noodles, hand-made raw noodles having a plurality of undulations formed at small pitches are known (Japanese Published Examined Patent Application No. 52-35753). The plurality of undulations of the raw noodles provide a specific feature of noodles when the noodles are eaten.